Jamie was ten years old when he saw his first p*rn*graphic s*x scene. During a sleepover, a classmate offered to show him ‘some funny pictures’ on his laptop. ‘At first I found it a bit scary and a bit yucky,’ Jamie told me as he shifted uncomfortably on his chair during our therapy session. ‘I didn’t know it was possible for people to do those sort of things — and there were lots of nasty close-ups.
But it gave me funny feelings and the pictures started to stick in my head.’ For the next three years, while his parents assumed he was using his computer for his homework, Jamie visited porn websites for up to two hours a night. Even when his school performance began to suffer, they had no idea of the murky world their shy, quiet son was inhabiting while upstairs in his bedroom.
While it’s not his real name, Jamie is typical of the young men I meet. He explained: ‘The websites led me to other websites and soon I was looking at even weirder stuff I could never have imagined — animals, children, stabbing and strangling. ‘I stopped leaving my room and seeing my friends because when I was away from the pornography, I was dying to get back to see what else I could find.’ And it was only when the police came knocking one morning that Jamie’s secret life was exposed.
After identifying that someone in the house was accessing child porn, they took Jamie’s laptop away for examination. Jamie is only 13 — and he still hasn’t even kissed a girl, let alone had s*x. Though he is only a child himself, the result is that he has been put on the S*x Offender Register, blighting his life for the foreseeable future. Even with intensive therapy, Jamie still suffers from deep shame — ‘as if it is written across my forehead’ — which has led him to fear he will never be able to form a healthy relationship with a woman.
